Thoughts.

Simple question. What’s your answer when you’re:

• Tossing with your buddy at the park?
• Warming up for your third game on Sunday?
• Walking to work?
• Getting up to go to the bathroom?
• Standing on the line waiting for the pull?
• On the way home after practice?

If the answer is ever “nothing,” you’ve got room to improve your improvement. Better your better.

What are you working on today–right now–to make yourself better?

Sorry for the lack of substantial content lately; first week of classes. Been taking a page out of Seth Godin’s writing of late; working on brevity and a bit of thought provocation, which is convenient since it takes less time to ask questions than answer them (admittedly the pet peeve that leads to the long drawn-out posts I often write–I’ll get back there in due time, hopefully with more read-able content).

This Wired article about why we sometimes slip up and do the things we’re trying so hard NOT to do hints at the power of the human subconscious and its relation to sport. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you’re a Neuroscience/Psych nerd like me, and points at two big takeaway points for ultimate.

Wired.com: It doesn’t seem practical to say, “Don’t try to think about not spilling wine on the carpet in a stressful situation,” when being at the party in the first place is stressful.

Wegner: Sometimes you’re stuck. The great leveler is making these processes automatic. In sports, people do things over and over until the action is automatic. It becomes so automatic that you don’t have the same mental process to engage. The whole thing has become unconscious. That only comes with practice.

The person who wants to avoid saying awkward things on the first date — well, by the 30th date, they’re not doing it anymore. They have to just brave it. In sports we know this, but we don’t think of social life the same way.

There’s one big takeaway–you need to hone your skills to the point that you stop thinking about them.

The other takeaway? How you phrase and frame your efforts (more particularly, how you talk and how you think) has a huge effect. Going into a game thinking “I can’t drop a disc” means you’re gearing your subconscious to think about dropping a disc and stopping it–all it takes is a tight moment, some extra stress, to engender exactly the outcome you’re trying to avoid. Thinking “I will catch every disc” doesn’t generate those same connotations. Talk in positives.

Means practicing them ALL THE TIME.

If you’re trying to improve your pivot, even your casual tossing around should always include a good, hard pivot. If you’re trying to improve your catching, you should ALWAYS be focusing on attacking the disc when it comes to you.

The key here is to focus–if you’re pivoting lackadaisically when you toss, what makes you think you’ll be able to suddenly pull it together when you’re trapped on the sideline and trying to dump it in a game?

This all harkens back to honing your instincts using deliberate practice–it’s not enough only to toss, or only to run…you need to invest your attention in it. Whether you’re consciously evaluating yourself or not is something of a question (you should not, however, be judging–i.e., “Man, I suck” or “Wow, I’m perfefct,” as either is distracting, a focus on result over process. More on process here), but your body and mind will not be able to make the necessary adjustments, or reinforce the good habits, if it’s not taking in sufficient amounts of information.

So if you’re trying to reinforce, say, a good step out on your throws, you need to be paying attention to stepping out–this doesn’t mean a microscopic focus on the minutae (your body can sense and sort those things out on its own to some extent), but merely that you have the intent to step out, and the intent to do it every time. Take this intent, and track your throws–do they go where you want? Keep focusing on what you want to happen until your body makes it so–or, if you’re a tinkerer, keep focusing on the adjustments you want to make until you likewise have agreement between what you expect and what you get. Repetition reinforces habits. Repetition of poor form or lazy mechanics will reinforce the same…develop good form through attention, and reinforce it with continued, deliberate effort.

Rock’em Socks-em recently sent me this article about balancing task focus and goal focus.

Thoughts? Opinions? Comment away.

I’ve written about ways to talk to keep your players in a better performance state here already, but allow me to put it more simply:

Live in the positive. And keep playing hard.

If you really scour my blog, you can find this info on my UCPC post on Alan Goldberg’s talk.

Rather than subscribe to stress, free yourself with focus. The opportunities to let yourself go and be content to simply live are limitless. You can become a better ultimate player in this way, and a better person, as well.

UPDATE: Micah adds in the comments that Dr. Goldberg has his own site up and running–I haven’t given it an in-depth look to say for or against it yet (it can often be the case that such sites are simply used to hook more customers without offering any of the meat of their ideas), but you might find it helpful.

Do you think about what you say?

I know you think you do. But do you really think about what you say? About how what you say might reveal things about yourself you had no intention of revealing? About how what you say might affect your teammates’ or your own ability to perform?

There are a few ways to cope in ultimate. By “cope” I don’t mean dealing with failure. By “cope” I mean getting by and continuing to perform with the grind of 3, 4 games in a day. I’m talking about the entirety of your day’s experience, not just what you think of as the “critical,” “game-defining” moments (or especially their aftermath).

Largely, I think you can divide coping strategies into two camps. You have passive coping, and you have active coping. This goes a bit with personality types as well.

Your passive copers more or less go with whatever the flow of the moment is. If things are going well and/or the team is getting excited, they (can) get excited. If things are not going as well, your passive types are generally at a loss for what to do to right the ship. On their own, they can’t create much. They’re sheep, psychologically speaking, able to be molded and guided to various ends.

Your active types, for better or worse, help to catalyze the passive types. This is the guy on the other team that’s always initiating the call in the other team’s call and response cheer. This is the guy that rushes the field ahead of the rest. This is the girl that spikes the disc to get her teammates pumped up.

This is also the type that most strongly influences the team’s level of arousal–how up or down a team gets for playing. Most teams will have more than one of these, but how these individuals respond to the team’s fortunes–whether that be success or setback–will tend to set the tone for the rest of the team. As a general rule, you can get enhanced performance out of getting “up” for a given moment or game, but over the course of a weekend this level of intensity is near impossible to sustain and will be prone to crash downwards (usually responsible in some form or another for most comebacks in ultimate). Rare indeed is the individual who can sustain themselves purely out of emotion, so learning to guide the team towards a more balanced state of mind is the ideal here.

Whether naturally inclined to be more passive or more active, you can still learn to talk and carry yourself in such a way that your teammates can more easily remain at a balanced level of arousal.

For a bit of a discussion on the notion of psychology and performance, check out my UCPC recap from two years ago of Alan Greenberg’s talk on performance psychology.

The key thing to note here–optimal performance comes when a player is fully invested in the experience at hand (literally, if we’re talking about catching or throwing). Players who focus too much on what just happened, or what might happen, rather than on what IS happening, are the sorts of players who wind up in their own heads, botching easy plays or attempting the sorts of actions that you normally wouldn’t expect from them. The score, for instance, has nothing to do with your performance on the field. So you were just broken–so what? Other than perhaps making strategic adjustments, there’s no need to dwell on the matter. So your team will go to nationals if it can just close out this game–so what? You haven’t closed it out yet. Don’t start dreaming about Nationals, and don’t start dreaming of what might happen if you don’t make the cut. Get your head in the game, while cliche, is totally appropriate here.

So how do you talk to encourage continued performance? Some do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Focus on the process rather than the outcome. If you’re a captain or a coach (coaches can afford to think a bit more broadly, as they don’t have to perform), and have to give the team guidance, to some extent you need to be aware of what parts of your team’s process are or are not working. This manifests in talk to the effect of “our dump motion is good; we’re having a few miscues with our handlers, so handlers need to focus on making one hard cut and clearing out to create space for the fill cut,” rather than “we’re getting beaten on short turnovers on the dump. Last point Mackey was dancing out there in the lane and clogged it up for everybody else.” With the former the focus is on improving the process; in the latter it is on the outcome, and additionally focuses on a single individual and a single situation–as soon as you get your athletes thinking about specific incidents in the past you’re taking them out of their game-ready state.
• Avoid talk on the line about anything other than the next point’s strategy. Yeah, you joke around on the line a bit. But at some point, your need to focus on what’s going to happen in the point–you’re going to have to get your mindset ready to play at some point during the point; it’s usually best if this point is before the pull instead of during or after. On Dartmouth this year, our O line cued themselves to get their head in the game and focus on the next point with an all-together clap, in much the same way a football huddle breaks. You might think it’s silly, but all it takes is something as simple and consistent as that to get your head right.
• Cue everyone to keep focused. You don’t necessarily have to do this by explicitly stating “hey guys, let’s focus,” but there are far worse things you can say than that. Your team should want to stay in the game–if they’re reluctant to, you’ve got bigger problems than simply player focus–so it shouldn’t take much to cue players on the sideline to stay focused on the now rather than getting caught up in whatever the day’s drama (or cool play, etc) is.
• Talk in terms of actions the team can take, rather than describing a situation. It’s all well and good to recount what just happened in the first half, but really, that doesn’t help your team out nearly as much as describing to them what should be focused on in the second half. Generally speaking, you don’t need to justify why certain adjustments are being made (you can simply offer, “we’re going to try zone” if they’ve been burning you in man–nobody needs to be reminded to know the reasons for which the change is occuring), simply give instruction and trust your team to execute. Keep the focus on the field in the current point.

DON’T

• Be “that guy.” The one who’s always talking. Even if you’re encouraging your teammates to stay focused, realize that if you hassle too much (and lack the authority/respect of a coach or captain–and sometimes even if you do have it) you might take their minds off of whatever they were thinking about, only to divert those thoughts to resentment of you. Develop a feel for your teammates and what they need to cue focus, and strive to help them keep themselves in line too–this is not a one man job, by any means, but avoiding pitfalls is a team effort.
• Bring up specific incidents on the field until after the game is over (the need for performance has ceased). I’m talking about call-outs here, not the sort of discussion you have with a teammate after a point ends to clarify when the miscommunication occurred and what could be done to correct it next time. Like the example above, there is little to no productive effect to calling a player out for a bad play, and generally little gain from calling a player out for a single exceptional play (if your goal is learning, however, it might be wise to point out examples of the behavior you want all of your players to model).
• Talk about the other team. Strategically, you can certainly talk to your team with new objectives in mind, but remarking on the team’s: relative level of ability (“we should beat these guys”); personality (“these guys are assholes”); stud players (“#33 is really good!”), etc.
• Tolerate comments or behavior which focuses on results or anything other than the situation at hand. Obviously, social decency means you tread carefully on this rather than stomping on somebody who’s talking–remember the first bullet for “Don’t”‘s–but to the extent that you can eliminate the tendency for your team to, for instance, go on and on about what specifically went wrong in a specific instance or players to offer comments that aren’t specifically geared towards focusing on the game at hand and what actions need to be taken in the huddle, the more your players will be able to remain in an optimal performance state.
• Call players out for good/bad/whatever play while they are on the field. It’s one thing to give feedback after a point is over. One of the worst things you can do to a player who is in the flow of a point is force them to think about something they did previously by referring to some incident in the past or to what you expect them to do in the future. This does not mean you can’t offer encouragement and helpful information–”left/right shoulder” in a zone is helpful; “I expect another hot D this point, Kell” is not. Under no circumstances should you force a player to think on the field! I don’t mean the cognitive processes necessary for a given point, reading one’s man or the defense, etc, I mean thinking about that cute guy on the sideline, or about the last sweet play she made–the play has already been made. Relive it later when she doesn’t have to play.
• Ask what the score is right before the pull goes up when you’re on the line. Big pet peeve of mine. If you think being down by one or up by one should make a difference in how you play, note that you just agreed to thinking–the anathema to performance. The ONLY time score should be relevant to you as a player is in situations like universe point, where you know that you do not need to conserve your energy for another point following this one. Thinking about your team’s lead or deficit is otherwise a pretty fruitless endeavor. Leave the score keeping to your coach, or to somebody who isn’t you on the sideline.

You get the idea. As a general rule, don’t think, do (note that this was one of the first posts I made on this blog). Don’t talk, instruct. Don’t recap…refocus. And execute. It’s that simple (and that hard).

Run. Accelerate. Sprint.

Catch.

Stop. Assess. SEE.

Throw.

Run. Accelerate. Sprint.

Lather, rinse, repeat. In order to be successful at this sport you have to hone two divergent skill sets–you have to learn how to play two different games.

There’s the running game–you exert yourself, often in coordination with those around you, frequently at high or full effort.

And then there’s the throwing game. You calm yourself, and the efforts of your teammates only matter in the context that you devote your attention to them and choose to give them the frisbee. You execute, not a brute force, explosive movement, but a well-refined, controlled one.

Running takes effort, but it’s the effort of willing your muscles to do more. You will them to apply more force so you can run faster and jump higher.

Throwing takes effort, too, but it’s the effort of focus. You will many muscles to do less–to get out of the way–so that the main players can do their job and deliver the disc.

Both of these are automatic processes to a point.

Running amps up with exertion.

Throwing with exertion leads to stiffness and bladey, ill-placed throws.

Both benefit from a performance-oriented state of mind. Focus. However, the foci are different.

Running, you focus on the situation, you recognize opportunities on O and D, but more than anything else you push your button to kick your body into overdrive when it counts.

Throwing, you focus on the situation, you recognize opportunities on O, but more than anything else you let go of your body, allowing it to perform what you ask, when it counts.

Both have their limits.

Running, the limit is your body and its energy reserves. When those run out, you can keep hammering away at that button, but your body won’t respond.

Throwing, there is a theoretical limit from your body, but above that threshold the limit is your mind. When you lose focus (and the necessary level of focus may increase with fatigue), you lose execution. Form gets sloppy, or you tighten up, and throws become a hope rather than a certainty.

Practice.

Train your body so the energy reserves run out more slowly and regenerate more quickly.

Train your mind so you can maintain focus even as you fatigue. Train your mind as you train your body to throw, learn to let go. Learn to trust your body. Learn when and how to guide it.

This is how you find success in the biathlon. Lose sight of neither your focus nor your drive.